The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
A need in hospital operations management is creating an operational control center which reconciles the needs of individual departments for the greater aims of more capacity at the institutional level. For these tradeoffs to be rationally made, the interdependencies of the millions of combinations of capacity, asset assignment, staff assignment and protocol choice must be calculated and then reduced to a small number of ranked and feasible scenarios so that an automated control may direct most operations and then isolate the collaboration of cross functional teams involved in managing the flow of patients and operations of the hospital with informed user intervention. These cross departmental decisions that benefit from analytical processing yet also need user judgment may be improved from the current practice of “huddles” where no probabilistic duration and little dynamic interdependencies can be considered. The byproduct of a lack of ability to forecast multiple feasible futures results in the current practice of scheduling “slack” into core operations practice. This slack is used as a physical time buffer to account for scheduling mismatching of patient services across departments when the departments do not have an ability to jointly co-optimize sequencing. These departments include functions such as admitting, bed management, scheduling, staffing, environmental systems, cleaning staff, transport dispatchers, diagnostic imaging, labs, physical therapy, meals and other related functions. Each of these functional members has access to their function-specific transactional IT systems and currently use them to perform their work. The present disclosure enables cross departmental operations automation and user intervention when needed.
In addition to their individual transactional systems, which may be their current departmental applications, tone function of the disclosed system supports these teams in effective collaboration by displaying key dashboards from select sub-systems onto large screen displays that are mounted on the walls in a conference room during an operations huddle, typically conducted once or twice a day or in an operations center which may be a dedicated room or virtual presence. Each of these source systems remain distinct and are often provided from multiple vendors. Users are left to determine the hundreds of interdependencies of a patient as the patient's care is planned and managed. Yet the actual co-optimization is impossible to reconcile with individual systems, especially when conditional branches or sequences are available in a care plan that traverses departments, as most do. Patients experience this lack of co-optimized control of assets and capacity as “hurry and wait”. Those delays accumulate and restrict hospital throughput.
It should be noted that in a hospital environment it can be conservatively estimated that if there were 250 rolling patients, 5 available pathways, 15 pathway steps, this results in a potential reorder of 360,360 possible combinations. Assuming it would take someone 30 seconds to run one combination, it would take 20,568 person years to choose the correct combination. Being infeasible, the tradition is to create rules of thumb or standard policies that build in slack or margin of operational error.